I think it’s starting to happen. Google is making public domain books available for the iPhone and G2. And Amazon is making its Kindle-ready collection for other readers, too.
Pretty soon we’ll be aiming our phones at airport bookstores as we’re conveyer-belting to the gate, and pulling in the latest titles directly to our hand-held devices.
In Japan, they already use their mobile phones to pay bills, as transit passes, and to swap name cards.
And you thought you couldn’t live without your cell phone now….
More evidence of the transition. The Washington Post’s Book World is dead. The culprit? Publishers who didn’t pony up for ads. Somehow, seems to me that book buyers buy other things, too…
I missed this when Esquire published it in the fall… E-ink. It’s the same technology that goes into the kindle, but somehow, seeing the words change on a “static” piece of paper is mind-boggling. More evidence that words are going digital fast.
Back when I was a barista, and before that was a common word, a customer once offered an explanation for the crowds in the coffee shop. “In bad times, people are more willing to pay for small luxuries.”
In the last ten years, no one has done more for book sales than Oprah. I believe a direct connection could be made between her book club and the proliferation of book clubs around the country – including my own (very male) book club, which otherwise has no discernible similarities to anything that can be seen on daytime TV, unless you stray into cable.
But American Presidents have a way of stimulating book demand, too. An obscure techno-thriller writer named Tom Clancy got a rocket boost when President Ronald Reagan described The Hunt for Red October as “unputdown-able.” I remember when the first President Bush mentioned The Guns of Augustas a book he thought long and hard about before the first Gulf War – though I doubt there was a surge of readers towards Barbara Tuchman’s deserving history. President Clinton was a reader but for the life of me I can’t remember any particular books he recommended – though I do remember an unsettling anecdote in which he was purported to have quoted a page from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury by memory. President George W. Bush once mentioned he’d been reading Camus’ The Stranger – another scary moment.
So maybe my theory is buncombe and there’s no relationship between presidential reading material and book sales, except for Reagan. But there has certainly been a wave of interest in certain books because of Obama. I’ve heard so many mentions of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Lincoln, currently #12 in Amazon sales rankings, that “team of rivals” seems to have become the phrase of the year – or right up there with “credit crisis.” Now there’s this article wondering which book about FDR Obama meant and what that will do its sales.
Of course, Obama is a best-selling author of his own – and he faced off against another best-selling author in Senator McCain. But I’ll be waiting to see what leadership book, literary novel, or thriller he gets caught with next. It will likely be a sign of the times. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be the first president to boost science fiction sales.
